SEOUL, September 03 (AJP) - South Korea will open five sets of culture-sector public data in AI-ready formats, covering traditional music, tourism, policy information and cultural assets, the culture ministry said Thursday.
The Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism said the data will come from four public institutions: the National Gugak Center, the National Library of Korea, the Korea Tourism Organization and the Korea Culture Information Service Agency.
Project is part of the Ministry of the Interior and Safety's "AI and High-Value Public Data Top 100" initiative, launched in 2025. Under the project, the culture ministry will reprocess data from the culture, arts, sports and tourism sectors into AI-friendly formats and release them in December through the public data portal, data.go.kr, as nationally designated core data.
Five data sets will include digital sound and image data related to gugak, or traditional Korean music, with added information on genres, instruments, rhythms, performance techniques and cultural context.
Policy information collected by the National Library of Korea will also be converted into data that can be used for AI training, including question-and-answer data sets and information organized by major policy, social and economic issues.
Tourism data will include updated Korean and multilingual travel information, along with expanded access to regional and themed tourism video content.
Agency will prepare data on 3D cultural assets, Korean clothing and traditional patterns in formats suitable for AI learning and use, with expert review applied to strengthen the cultural and historical reliability of the data. The agency will also build ontology-based information on the relationships among cultural assets to help AI systems better understand Korean cultural context.
Ministry will introduce a Model Context Protocol-based linkage system for the first time, using MCP, a common communication standard that allows AI models to connect with external data and tools. The ministry said the system is intended to shift public cultural data from resources that people search and download to resources that AI services and agents can connect to and use directly.
Moreover, the ministry plans to open a total of 12 AI-ready and high-value data sets by 2027, including five this year and seven next year.
A ministry official said opening high-value cultural data for AI use is a key part of Korea's content industry strategy, and that the ministry will continue releasing more high-value cultural data, including library catalog information, museum artifact records and film data.
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